Are we done yet?

And my mood is getting to be optimistically cautious. It surfaces immediately in my latest tweet which in turn was inspired by the recent tweet from Clifford Alvares, an Outlook Money correspondent.

Tell-tale signs of the next downturn: Slow-down in daily FII figures; market PE of 24+; unjustified run in small-caps — and free lunches. 5:50 PM Sep 6th via web Retweeted by you

Most of the people tracking and working the markets will be cautiously optimistic now, but I’m a worm. And worms have no spine. It’s getting to be a cacophony of dire predictions and upbeat prophecies. The more one reads and listens and watches, the more confusing it gets. But if you dont read or listen or watch, you might as well invest using your keen sense of smell or touch, maybe. Thats puts a weird thought in the wormy head. I am thinking of taking a leaf out of Curtis Faith‘s “Way of the Turtle“, where two stock market professionals recruited a couple of dozen bright men and women with no prior experience of trading and transformed them into star traders in two weeks flat (or maybe more). The basic premise being that trading is a skill that can be learnt just like any other academic/vocational course and that traders are made not born. So, what I’m going to do is recruit a dozen sharp blind men and women. Then as study material I’m going to give them thousands of historical stock charts converted into 3d, beveling up the stock price movement lines and make them trace their fingers on the line. The charts would run only upto certain arbitrarily chosen past points in time but I would urge my blind charges to carry on the “momentum” of their fingers….the future path which the fingers take will be compared against actual historical movements and feedback will be provided….. if this experiment of mine ever gets done, then my hypothesis that blind people can make the best technical investors can be tested. Maybe this personal blind worm method of forecasting will work for me. I’ll write a book, become hugely famous and after a hundred years, people will falsely believe that the phrase “momentum investing” was coined off the tips of blind star traders.

The reason for this lunatic ambling within moving average envelopes is that expert opinions are certainly not helping:

The New York Times carries a story telling us all that the cloud of a double dip recession seems to have passed us by while Nouriel Roubini chastises the US economy planners that we are now defenceless against the looming threat of a double dip. A year or so back, if you’d have mentioned double dip to me, I’d have visions of Taj Mahal tea bags and “dip dip dip, and it’s ready to sip. Do you want it stronger, then dip a little longer. Dip, dip, dip..and it’s ready to sip”. But that’s a triple dip – maybe a new challenge worthy for Roubini. But for now, everyone and her pet poodle is talking of double dips:

I felt that this interview of the equity analyst, Sangeeta Purushottam dispensed some sane advice. It seems to say that there could be money waiting on the sidelines and it could come pouring in taking our local markets to euphoric heights. But the premise operating here is that there is indeed money waiting on the sidelines. Is there? A browse through global investing sites does not indicate a clamour to invest in the much discovered Asian bourses. Indeed, for all that noise about the NIFTY reaching it’s 31 month high, this country performance table by The Bespoke Investment Group is quite educative and humbling. But then the presses in the USA are printing and printing and printing. Strange things can happen.

So I crawled the SEBI website to ferret out FII net flows into Indian equity over time. I left out derivative data and picked data representing the FIIs’ stock exchange investments and primary market data only. I think the chart speaks for itself. The main question however remains unanswered: is there is more cash coming India’s way via the FII route for the remainder of the year (net inflows)? Since Jan’10, c 60,000 crores of rupees have come into Indian markets via the FII direct participation in equity. Logic dictates that we should definitely get in more for the remainder of the 115 calendar days left in 2010. However, I noticed that typically there are 3 months (modal frequency) that see net FII withdrawals from the equity markets. We have seen two down months this year (January and May) – is a third one coming? So money will definitely be made, euphoria or not, but it calls for nimble trading and investing. That to me is a big problem since I am a worm after all. Any advise will be greatly appreciated.